Wild Horses: Do We Have to Cheer for Ann Romney at the Olympics?

This year, in London, will there be a red-state Olympics and a blue one? Ann Romney’s horse Rafalca is going, to compete as a team alongside her trainer, Jan Ebeling, whom she pays to win. They qualified this past weekend; at the event that clinched the spot, Ann Romney held up one of the foam fingers that the dressage federation had ordered to show that it could take a joke that Stephen Colbert had made about the sport’s élitism. Ann cheered; Rafalca and Ebeling came in third. On this basis, she has been called, in some reports, an Olympian. Let’s grant her that.

Ann Romney’s involvement in the Olympics, though, raises some questions beyond the obvious ones suggested by a sport that is pursued at its upper levels, or played, primarily by the wealthy and their retainers. What does it mean for the wife of a Presidential candidate to be personally represented at the Olympics, if not actually on the field representing our country? In a month and a bit, when the Games open, we may find that it complicates our cheering obligations, tainting or heightening the mix of vague patriotism and keen commercialism that constitute the Olympic spirit, and make it fun. We’ll also see, soon enough, if the Games offer an opportunity for Romney or, for that matter, for Obama. Do we have to cheer for Ann? Does Romney get to accuse Obama of a lack of patriotism if we don’t?

Adam Gopnik writes in the magazine this week about how the Olympics evoke an odd sort of internationalist nationalism—a willingness, for a few weeks every four years, to learn the rules of team handball, or rhythmic gymnastics, or dressage, and celebrate the sports and the athletes who represent us. And almost every Olympics has, in a broad sense, provided an arena for politics. But the disputes are more often between international powers, rather than within them—see the blood-in-the-water match between the Soviets and Hungarians in 1956; the Miracle on Ice; boycotts—or else domestic fights about the games themselves, maybe having to do with the funding or the placement of a stadium. There are also moments laden with symbolism, like the triumph of Jesse Owens, or the handing of the torch, in Sydney, to a young aboriginal runner. But we haven’t really had an athlete sponsored by a major-party candidate or his wife. When there is an overt acknowledgement of America’s domestic divisions, as when Tommie Smith and John Carlos gave the black-power salute at the 1968 Olympics, we tend to act badly; the unfairness and even cruelty of the response to Smith and Carlos has only really been recognized in recent years.

Dressage, too, is a tricky sport politically, in part because many people have trouble seeing the sporting part at all. What they see is the money; it is as though each of the prancing horses were pacing out the shape of a dollar sign. (The political figure, or figurehead, most associated with Olympic equestrian events may be Anne, Britain’s Princess Royal, whose name may have unfortunate echoes here.)

It is not clear that the Romney campaign grasps that. Because Ann Romney took up the sport as therapy for her multiple sclerosis, it might, on another planet, be seen as a way to talk about her struggles. Mitt Romney tried to take this approach when Bob Schieffer asked him about the “Olympic athlete in the family,” in an interview on Face the Nation last week, but it didn’t quite work. “Isn’t that something?” Romney said, before clarifying that “she’s the athlete. But in this case, it’s not her personally.” He continued:

Yes, it’s the sport of dressage, not many people are familiar with it. But something for which she has a passion and frankly, her getting back on a horse after she was diagnosed with MS, was able— she is convinced to help her regenerate her strength and renew that— that vigor. And so she cares very deeply about— about this sport and about— and about horses…. I joke that I’m going to have to send her to Betty Ford for addiction to horses.

“Betty Ford”? His answer, like many things he says, almost worked, before veering off into awkwardness. Americans may not care that the Romneys are rich; they may like it. Even Romney’s supporters may give him low style points for the way that even straightforward rhetorical opportunities are mangled by, above all, his poor intuition, not only about symbols but about what words mean.

Romney should have a special, sentimental claim on the Games, having saved, as he often says, the Salt Lake City Olympics. The problem is that most voters are a little vague on what the Olympics needed to be saved from; the disasters are better remembered than the solid spectacles. Sports are an area of special clumsiness for him, and getting excited about dressage won’t help. It used to be considered a gaffe when he talked about knowing the owners of football or NASCAR teams. When he talks about knowing the owner—or co-owner; two friends are in it, too—of the horse in a dressage team, that’s just family news.

The potential reward for the Romneys is that voters will come to think of Ann Romney as a matronly Kerri Strug. The danger is that they will be haunted by a vision of a First Lady wearing a top hat in the Inaugural parade, riding through Washington on a high-stepping horse. None of this is Rafalca’s fault. The horse is on our team, as Americans. It would be churlish, knowing nothing else about horses—and let’s admit that most of us don’t—to boo Romney’s mare. But we shouldn’t let ourselves be bullied into waving little Rafalca flags, either.

The Romneys reported a business loss for the care of Rafalca that added up to some seventy-seven thousand dollars. This may be entirely within the rules, but it’s a reminder of how the tax code is full of pleasant surprises if one is rich, which remain invisible if one is not. Another, which the Times reported on extensively, is a lawsuit involving the damaged leg of a horse, and whether Ann Romney, its previous owner, had known about it before the horse, named Super Hit, was sold (she was later removed from the suit). This resulted in a lawsuit because Super Hit cost a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars. Money complicates everything with the Romneys, and they haven’t yet learned how to talk about it. Instead, they might just go to the Olympics, and tell the rest of us to come along to cheer. In an election year, though, we can choose our own sports.

Photograph by Victor J. Blue/The New York Times/Redux.

Amy Davidson Sorkin is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.